‘I have a dark and dreadful secret: I write poetry’ (Fry, 2006, foreword)
I was listening to the opening three minutes of the ‘foreword’ to Stephen Fry’s Ode Less travelled: Unlocking the poet within, on Audible, during my Sunday morning walk, when these first words brought me to a ‘literary’ halt. Was writing poetry my secret? Was it dark and dreadful? Was it ‘an embarrassing confession’? And that’s not all. Fry goes on to compare more worthy and respectable hobbies picked up by men of influence and standing, beginning with Churchill, who ‘painted’; Einstein, who ‘played the violin’, Hemingway, who ‘hunted’, and so on, and then, continues to drag down the stature of writing poetry by stating it to be the most ‘embarrassing’ of all hobbies to admit to, publicly, to a British audience.
While Fry goes on to metaphorically lift the poet out of the pits of public opinion and begins to peel away the misconceptions surrounding the writing of poetry to eventually pay homage to this life-giving exercise, this blog post is an attempt to navigate the discomfort that Fry’s opening paragraph evokes in me as a writer of poetry. Private as the exercise may be for me, is it or was it, at any time in the past, my ‘dark and dreadful secret’? Do I, or did I ever, feel embarrassed about admitting it to audiences, who, according to Fry, have little or no respect for it? While the writer of poetry within me cannot be tempted to explain, the literary critic in me makes me wonder why Fry chose to hook their readers into the book by calling out to an un-uttered but seemingly ever-present contempt for the one who writes poetry? Why did Fry want to address those first who consider it an ‘embarrassment’? Why not those who didn’t? Perhaps Fry believes that the best defense is attack and through this is hoping to shield and fiercely safeguard the writer of poetry, from the public censure, criticism and condescension that threaten to undermine it. And in doing so, Fry reaffirms for me, the challenges of navigating the not-so-perfect split, and the many lines of defense, that the author, critic and editor, together build around the poet to protect it, as soon as it decides to publish its ‘ode[s] less travelled’ and ‘unlock the poet’ for public review.
While I leave Fry to his reasons for a while, I discomfortingly turn to the two important questions that seem to unhinge me as a writer:
- Is, or was, writing poetry, ever, a ‘dark and dreadful secret’ for me?
- Do I, or did I ever, feel embarrassed about admitting it to audiences, who, according to Fry, have little or no respect for it or for the poets who write it?
The second question, I would like to address first. Simply because it is not for me, the poet, but for me, the editor of On sad afternoons, who took upon the task of sorting all the poems in this collection for a specific audience and readership. Did I arrange and organise my poems for an audience who had little to no respect for poetry or for me for writing it? And the simple answer is, no.
While Fry, in his deceptive reverence of British intelligentsia, may assume there are more critics than lovers of poetry in them, in the postmodern and postcolonial settings, in which I teach, write and create, I do not share his reverence. And so, it is not difficult to dis-identify with whatever perceptions the British may have had of writers of poetry back then. The disenchantment, the critic and teacher within me admit, is rather recent, and has come about since my IB DP students have forced me to move away from the traditional, prescribed syllabi of canonical texts and poets, to embrace, instead, the critical and creative freedom of the curriculum to explore the poetry that resonates with us. And so, we have ended up exploring and writing, song lyrics, rap, slam, free verse and more. When Wordsworth’s Daffodils seemed a distant truth, Gordon J Ramel’s No more daffodils could be relied upon to resurrect it, and offer an appreciation of some of what has been lost in the literary wormhole.
And so, with each poem, and its many postmodern adaptations, I moved away from the canon inch by inch, till the canonical walls within which each poem was idealised, fell away. Poetry certainly became for me, as a writer, an increasingly porous space in which I increasingly felt free to . . .
*
Imagine a white room
Without walls
With white curtains
Fluttering in the breeze
*
And because
There [was] nothing to stop it from trespassing
In drift[ed]
A blue butterfly.
(Khan, 2021, p.46, ‘The Blue Butterflies’)
And so in many ways, the blue butterfly, that entered my creative room, came loaded with the possibilities of writing that only come when we flutter into spaces without needing the approval or permission to write. It certainly did not need the defense that other split selves were eager to offer it.
And so, my many split selves, the critic, the editor and the writer, along with the teacher, continue to watch from the sidelines, as the poet works alone. The transformative space that the teacher created for the blue butterfly to enter, cannot be intruded upon as a poem takes flight. The editor cannot disturb its flight path and must gather each ‘white room’ without making its presence felt on sad afternoons. And the critic, unlike Fry, must not speak in defense of it, to any prospective audiences it envisions being embarrassed by it.
And so, as each poem arrives at what it was meant to, without ‘embarrassment’, each split self joins hands to celebrate the arrival. And so, you have the literary critic, reaching out to all audiences, through each blog post, and the creative designer through each instapost, to preserve the challenges of articulating each exploration without losing its essence on sad afternoons.
And so, I increasingly add, a differentiating bubble to protect:
A bubble
Within a bubble
And more
(Khan, 2021, p. 30, ‘Projections’)
Is, or was, writing poetry, ever, a ‘dark and dreadful secret’ for me?
And as I wonder what exactly all split selves are trying to protect and defend, I realise, I must ask the poet within to answer Fry’s first haunting question. Not one of us can speak for it.
And, as we all await a response, the blue butterfly flutters across a page and points to the thousand poems,
. . . pregnant
With the growing weight
Of all
That is never said
*
And therefore doomed
To roam
Full term
Along the hallways
Of my collective unconscious
Desperate to deliver
*
(Khan, 2021, p114, A thousand more).
. . . Perhaps the burden of Fry’s ‘dark and dreadful secret’.